In 2002, audiences filled Portland's Expo Center to watch a live performance of "Defiant Requiem." Created by Murry Sidlin, the Oregon Symphony's resident conductor at the time, the performance mixed actors, narration, interviews, video projections, singers and the orchestra to re-create what happened on June 23, 1944, in the "model" concentration camp in Terezin, a fortress
town 45 miles northwest of Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Designed for 5,000
prisoners, Terezin held 60,000 prisoners at its peak, many of them Jewish
scholars, artists, philosophers and writers. A choir of Jews is
performing Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem, a
thundering work about the Last Judgment. The 150 prisoners have learned
the music by rote, but in their extreme environment, they interpret the
ancient Latin words in ways that Verdi never could have imagined.

Weak from hunger, exhausted by hard labor, they are singing for
inspectors from the International Red Cross, accompanied by Nazi high
officials. Sitting in the front row is the architect of the Final
Solution, Adolf Eichmann. The choir
sings to their captors what they dare not say.

Ever since that Portland performance, Sidlin dreamed of bringing the
Requiem back to Terezin. Now, through concert footage, survivor recollections, cinematic dramatizations and animation, a film of the "Defiant Requiem" brings the story to life.